Quoth the Raven

Game Description: Victoria McPherson is a brilliant young FBI agent who's investigating a serial-murder case in Chicago. The body count is now at five and she has no real leads, nothing but a mountain of circumstantial evidence and a boss who's breathing down her neck. In order to take a break from it all, she decides to visit her father in the suburbs. Their discussions involve family stories which include Victoria's grandfather, who used to be a private investigator. This leads Victoria to read one of her grandfather's old case files, a file which reveals an uncomfortably high number of similarities between a 75-year-old case in Europe and the current string of killings in Chicago. Take a deep breath and enter Still Life.

Murder mysteries have just a single rule that they need to obey. No matter how outlandish the setting, characters, or events, any entry in the murder mystery genre must contain but one thing—a solution. At the end of the story, we must discover who did it. It's actually right there in the genre title. Given that I've chosen to open the review this way, would anyone care to guess what my main problem with the game Still Life was?

Just a few minutes in, I was absolutely sure that Moment of Silence was a European game. It opens with a stunning cutscene that depicts a group of stormtroopers raiding a journalist's apartment and kidnapping him while his family looks on in horror. How does the main character react to this? Run out into the hallway, guns blazing? Climb out the window and work his way down a series of drainpipes and trellises to steal the SWAT team van so he can infiltrate their base? No, he watches the scene through a peep-hole and then, when the commotion has died down, he goes into the hallway and retrieves a teddy bear tossed aside during the struggle, then returns it to the crying child of the kidnapped reporter. So, yeah, right as the game begins, I'm fairly sure no North American developer was responsible for this.

Like Erin, I also spent time with some PC adventure titles during my youth, most notably Space Quest and the infamous Leisure Suit Larry series. 1998's Grim Fandango was a more recent one, and I enjoyed that just as much as the old-schoolers, if not more. So, it comes as no real surprise that I thought Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon was a great disc to spend time with. It meets all the genre's quasi-requirements like snappy dialogue and a light tone, presenting a genuinely enjoyable adventure. It may knock twitch gamers unconscious with its lack of combat and relatively slow pace, but this is a kind of game that I don't want to see disappear into the annals of history, mouse or no mouse.

Game Description: The murder of an underground hacker in Paris is just the beginning of this extraordinary adventure for George Stobbard and Nico Collard in the highly anticipated Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon. Powerful seismic events are shaking the world. An Ancient Conspiracy, the Secrets of the Templars, and a fiendish source of pure Evil are responsible. From the jungles of the Congo to the deceptive calm of the English West Country and gothic castles time is running out for the Earth and only George and Nico can save it.An epic narrative from Europe's master interactive storytellers; Stunning graphics delivered by a radical new graphic engine; Wholly intuitive direct control interface fresh gameplay navigation for full control of the character; Movie quality script and voice acting, with facial animation choreography using Virtual Actor Engine.

In terms of winning over new gamers to the cause, I doubt that the addition of a few things to climb on, some very elementary stealth scenarios, and a whole bunch of crates to push around doesn't change the game enough to appeal to those who find adventure games boring to begin with. The Sleeping Dragon is more about keeping the faith than anything.

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